China builds worlds largest radio telescope

[Siz]

http://www.techinsider.io/world-largest-radio-telescope-china-2015-10

The 500-Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is being built in China. With a dish the size of 30 football fields, it will be the largest radio telescope in the world when it is completed in 2016. Its unique design will allow scientists to gather radio signals from tens of billions of light years away.

Not much detail given on this site, but then China's not really known for its sharing is it?! I wonder if we'll ever have access to any of the data...?

[Magdalena]

I hope they point this thing in the direction of the star that's emitting Extremely Unusual Light Patterns. 
http://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=14078.0

[Tank]

http://www.techinsider.io/world-largest-radio-telescope-china-2015-10

The 500-Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is being built in China. With a dish the size of 30 football fields, it will be the largest radio telescope in the world when it is completed in 2016. Its unique design will allow scientists to gather radio signals from tens of billions of light years away.

Not much detail given on this site, but then China's not really known for its sharing is it?! I wonder if we'll ever have access to any of the data...?

I'd be very surprised if they didn't start creating papers with the data.

[Siz]

No doubt. But full disclosure? It's military funded.

[OldGit]

It's mostly pulling in the aliens' industrial secrets.  Soon you'll see them ripping off Whoople products such as the digital antenna preener.

[Icarus]

A link from that site, the Chinese radio telescope, has pictures of NASAs under ice vehicle. The thing crawls around under ice sheets and is intended to explore under the ice on Europa.  Speculation is that there may be living organisms there.  Will wonders never cease?

[OldGit]

Will wonders never cease?

No, and the Chinese will never cease copying them.

[Tank]

Will wonders never cease?

No, and the Chinese will never cease copying them.

You mean reclaiming their ideas like money?

[Recusant]

Certainly this will be larger than the single-dish radio telescope at Aricebo, but will it actually be more sensitive than the VLA or the VLBA? I'll try to find out.

[Recusant]

So far, my research tells me that the new Chinese radio telescope will not actually be more sensitive than the VLA.

From New Eyes on the Universe:

The poor resolution of single-dish radio telescopes was their main limitation in the early days of radio astronomy. After all, it's of little use capturing cosmic radio emission if you can't tell what object is emitting the radiation. There is a way around this limitation, however. A single radio dish will inevitably have poor angular resolution compared to an optical telescope but by combining the signals from several widely separated dishes it's possible to achieve extremely high resolving power, since the resolving power of an interferometer depends upon the distance between the dishes rather than the size of the individual dishes themselves. For example, the Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico, is an interferometer consisting of 27 antennae. Each antenna has a dish diameter of 25 m. The dishes are arranged along the three arms of a Y, with each arm consisting of a railway line that's 21 km long; the dishes can be moved to different points along the line. When the dishes are at their largest separation, and their signals are combined, the result in terms of resolving power is equivalent to having a single dish that's 36 km wide.

[Insoluble]

We may get a square kilometre array.
I don't know if it will actually be built.
If not why settle for a measly kilometre?  ???
May as well make it 100km.
If we're not going to make it.